Neoliberalism differs fundamentally from the Cold War era economy

Evidence

There is another way Team Regulation inadvertently capitulates to Team Greed. Team Regulation often has quipped a quick one-liner justification for its prescription: there were no financial crises (often left unstated: in the United States) from the 1940s to the mid-1980s; therefore, all we need do is reset all the dials back to that Golden Era. In subscribing to this notion, the left unconsciously accepts the key notion of the populist right and the neoclassical orthodoxy, that “nothing is substantially different between then and now.” Markets are timeless entities with timeless laws, they insist. Indeed, this is the identical premise of some of the most popular crisis books of the last few years, from Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart’s This Time Is Different to David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Yet that is precisely where the polemical divergence should originate on the left. Things are profoundly different about the economy, the society, and in the global political arena than they were during the Cold War: some recent neoliberal innovations have lent the current crisis its special bitter tang; understanding precisely how and where they are different is a necessary first step in developing a blueprint for a better world. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broader critique project: Mirowski’s argument that the left’s nostalgia for regulation-era markets accepts the neoclassical premise parallels prior work on how critique gets co-opted. — connects to: The neoliberal market state may differ fundamentally from the earlier punitive conjuncture; Late neoliberal capitalism resembles the Soviet system’s terminal phase but worse — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1957
• SEED: Angles toward an essay on how left responses to crisis unconsciously share premises with the orthodoxy they criticize — the ‘Golden Era nostalgia’ trap.

Broader Connections

• The neoliberal market state may differ fundamentally from the earlier punitive conjuncture #contradicts (0.82)